David Qiao's Blog

There is one missing feature in ButtonPanel. That’s the arrow key support. On Windows (probably on Mac as well), people get used to use left or right keys to navigate among buttons on a horizontal button panel or up/down keys for vertical button panel. However Swing doesn’t have that. For example, in the JOptionPane, arrow keys don’t change button focus. So I decide to add this feature. it has about 200 lines simple code. I included it below. The javadoc tells you how to use it. It is already checked in to JIDE Common Layer so feel free to check it out and use it. JIDE’s ButtonPanel called it already. JideOptionPane, since it uses ButtonPanel, also works beautifully.

I had been working closely with Wolfgang in last couple of months or so trying to support Synthetica L&F in all JIDE product lines. I am glad to say we are finally there. You can find some nice screenshots of our demos under various Synthetica themes below. They are all taken under JIDE 2.2.8 release with Synthetica 2.7.2/SyntheticaAddons 0.9.7.

• Black Moon Theme
• Black Start Theme
• Blue Ice Theme
• Blue Moon Theme
• Blue Steel Theme
• Green Dream Theme
• Mauve Mmetalic Theme
• Orange Mmetalic Theme
• Silver Moon Theme
• Sky Metal Theme
• White Vision Theme
• Standard Theme

Wolfgang, thanks for the support. The Synthetica L&F looks awesome.

As I mentioned before, I had an interesting BOF session for the this year JavaOne. The title is “Workaround Swing Bugs”. Even though it was conflicted with the afterdark party, there was still a decent number of people showed up. Since several people asked for it, I post the slides and the demo source code below.

Slides for BOF-5133
Demo Souce Code for BOF-5133